There's something very wrong here...

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Replies

  • katielauren2001
    katielauren2001 Posts: 171 Member
    Where I'm from there definitely tends to be high obesity levels, however I know that in my case my weight gain was not my fault - for alot people it is purely eating a large quantity of bad foods. People aren't receiving the education about food and nutrition, which I believe is the problem in most cases. Yet nothing is really done to combat obesity as the companies who feed people and make them obese are making immense amounts of profits.
  • xarge
    xarge Posts: 484 Member
    I pretty much agree with all of that.

    However, once again, the focus was not on differing macronutrient breakdowns so essentially it is speculation extrapolated from a study where the focus was on increased calorie consumption.

    You can base a hypothesis off it and then test it out in a study of course or compare it with studies that have gone before.

    I know, I wouldn't pick on it if you haven't joked about people crying carbs. :tongue:

    One other thing about increase in caloric intake is the social side of it. http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~rothblum/doc_pdf/weight/GenderDifferenceinSocial.pdf is an interesting study in general from 1988 but it's one citation that drew my attention:
    In 1967, when high school students were questioned about ideal weight, %80 of the females said that they wanted to weigh less. When we look at the average woman in those years, bcattoes is completely right by saying that the focus was being skinny then, just like now.

    But I think what the original study about the caloric intake lacks is that it should be identified in terms of socioeconomics. Eating habits of past generations, income, social environment and education (not talking about a diploma) all play a huge role on eating habits. If you are looking at a population with majority of it getting poorer despite working longer, it's only natural to see an increase in the consumption of fast and inexpensive food.
  • Redtango76
    Redtango76 Posts: 144
    I agree many people have become lazy. Not only too lazy to exercise, but too lazy to cook their own food properly. Instead, using ready made pies etc that are simply put on a tray in the oven, then transferred to a plate and eaten. No thought or effort goes into it and it's eaten with no thought for the nutritional content. My husband and I both love to cook and try new recipes. We adapt them to our own tastes and dietary requirements.

    My husband struggles to exercise as he has MD but he works hard even so. I work out daily at the gym now too.

    I agree and I dont at the same time ... We are a lot less active as a society however we have a lot more demands ( especially us women) than our moms and grandmother . Those demands take away from our time making it harder to chose to cook at home . My grandmother and mom stayed home didn't work tended to all the household responsibilities and cooked all the meals and we rarely ate out . Today a lot of work full time , on top of the household responsibilities, kids appt and activities, leaving little time left over . We are taxed to the max ...and now those of us on MFP are adding workouts and struggling to add proper nutrition to that list .
  • MaraDiaz
    MaraDiaz Posts: 4,604 Member
    As a species, we didn't evolve to cope with abundance. Add to that the cost of healthy foods compared to unhealthy foods and the stress of a lifestyle we also didn't evolve to cope with, plus being less physically active from childhood on, and we're lucky we're not all dead.
  • mortyfit
    mortyfit Posts: 354 Member
    Don't have to tell me about it--I live in Jacksonville, FL, which last year I believe was ranked the #12 Fattest City in the US, with over one-third of adults described as "Obese." Day to day looking around town, I don't doubt those statistics.
  • ZugTheMegasaurus
    ZugTheMegasaurus Posts: 801 Member
    I often wonder how much of this is attributable to the fact that people seem less able to cook than they used to. I'm 26 and people my age act completely astounded that I can cook simple meals that aren't burnt or disgusting. Even people in my mom's generation frequently seem baffled by how to make food themselves without getting at least some of it pre-prepared.

    When I went to visit my mom a little more than a year ago, she invited over a bunch of friends over for dinner one night and some of my brother's friends came over as well. To feed everyone, we spent a couple hours cooking a variety of foods, mostly from recipes we'd made up ourselves and tweaked over time. After we fed everyone, people asked where we'd bought the various items so that they could go pick some up. People did not believe that it was made from scratch; they actually opened up the trash in an attempt to find packaging and catch us in our lies (in a joking/friendly fashion). When we tried to explain the simple recipes, we might as well have been trying to explain wizardry.

    It's not that people are lazy or anything, they just have no clue how to turn ingredients into food that goes on a plate. And unfortunately, people who don't know are raising kids who then won't know either. It's sort of sad to me how many people struggle with losing weight just because they really can't make something that tastes better than fast food. If I honestly thought that healthy food was gross, I'd probably avoid it as well.

    I think you're on the right track, but I think it's even more than that. What these studies don't account for is that more people are going to work now and working longer hours. In the 70s most women still worked at home doing the cooking/cleaning/etc. Women were able to cook meals from scratch. Today women and men are at work. We get home at 7 or 8, there isn't a lot of time to cook a meal from scratch any more. And after working at 12 hour day instead of an 8 hour day, we don't spend as much time walking, cleaning, etc.
    I tend to think that's more the idealistic version of the past people tend to get once there are a few decades of distance than it is representative of reality. While upper- and some middle-class families were able to do that, there were actually many more women in the workforce than people realize. All my grandparents worked full-time, some blue-collar and some white-collar, but still worked the whole time they were raising their families. And in the prior generations, the economy was far more agrarian, requiring a whole lot of time and labor even if they weren't 9-5 jobs.

    It seems to me that it was more a matter of necessity. The sort of technological advances that give us a huge market of "convenience foods" today simply hadn't been developed yet. Instantly-ready meals were often expensive or unavailable. If you wanted to eat, you needed to know how to make food. It was taught in schools (though in an often-sexist way). Don't get me wrong, there were still bad cooks out there, but people usually knew the rudimentary basics.

    Today, you can easily feed an entire household without ever touching a raw ingredient, and a lot of people do that. I don't accept that it's because we're busier than in the past; I would argue that in a multitude of ways, mundane everyday tasks are easier and less time-consuming than they were in the past. And even if time is a factor in electing not to cook at home, I would say that goes back to the fact that people do not know how to do it. If you're lost in the kitchen, odds are your first attempts will take a really long time (and probably not turn out really well). But if you've been taught and practice cooking, you become more efficient and produce a better result, just like anything else in life. Yeah, you'll never come close to the 35 seconds required for frozen chicken nuggets, but that's not the same as 10 minutes for something else being prohibitively time-consuming.
  • Alex_is_Hawks
    Alex_is_Hawks Posts: 3,499 Member
    Plates and cups and portion sizes have also increased..lending a false sense of "being good"

    I have my great grandmothers china and it's HALF the size of the Gordon Ramsey plates I bought last year...

    back then you would eat one helping on a dinner plate that was the size of a side plate now...

    so we tell ourselves we stopped with one helping and we were good people...but if we TRULY stopped with one helping on a plate the size they were 40 years ago...we would be eating half as much as we eat now...

    that's terrifying...as a result? I put away the dinner plates, I eat off of the side plates only...or...my great grandmothers china.

    So true. Now that my food is measured out, when put my serving on our regular plates, there are huge expanses of empty white surface. At holiday meals, I'll have double portions, and relatives will still be asking why my plate is empty. Lord forbid I don't go up to get seconds! And don't forget the pie!

    Also: Gordon Ramsey has plates?!?!?

    he totally does...really nice white ones...but I guess now all they are good for is hanging up on the wall as decoration....as least the dinner plates...
  • ZugTheMegasaurus
    ZugTheMegasaurus Posts: 801 Member
    I often wonder how much of this is attributable to the fact that people seem less able to cook than they used to. I'm 26 and people my age act completely astounded that I can cook simple meals that aren't burnt or disgusting. Even people in my mom's generation frequently seem baffled by how to make food themselves without getting at least some of it pre-prepared.

    When I went to visit my mom a little more than a year ago, she invited over a bunch of friends over for dinner one night and some of my brother's friends came over as well. To feed everyone, we spent a couple hours cooking a variety of foods, mostly from recipes we'd made up ourselves and tweaked over time. After we fed everyone, people asked where we'd bought the various items so that they could go pick some up. People did not believe that it was made from scratch; they actually opened up the trash in an attempt to find packaging and catch us in our lies (in a joking/friendly fashion). When we tried to explain the simple recipes, we might as well have been trying to explain wizardry.

    It's not that people are lazy or anything, they just have no clue how to turn ingredients into food that goes on a plate. And unfortunately, people who don't know are raising kids who then won't know either. It's sort of sad to me how many people struggle with losing weight just because they really can't make something that tastes better than fast food. If I honestly thought that healthy food was gross, I'd probably avoid it as well.

    I think you're on the right track, but I think it's even more than that. What these studies don't account for is that more people are going to work now and working longer hours. In the 70s most women still worked at home doing the cooking/cleaning/etc. Women were able to cook meals from scratch. Today women and men are at work. We get home at 7 or 8, there isn't a lot of time to cook a meal from scratch any more. And after working at 12 hour day instead of an 8 hour day, we don't spend as much time walking, cleaning, etc.

    I think people overestimate how much cooking was done from scratch in the 70's. Pre-packaged food and frozen or canned vegetables were pretty common in a meal. Except for homegrown, fresh fruits and vegetables were not as readily available as now and were fairly expensive. And because only one parent usually worked, food budgets were tighter back then for many people. You just didn't walk into the local grocery and find the huge fresh produce sections that you do now.
    It's true that canned fruits and vegetables were common since the sort of technology that now allows us to quickly ship perishable food all over the planet hadn't been well-developed at that point. However, unlike today, you were less likely to find many meals that required no cooking whatsoever. Those preserved foods were more likely to be a component of a meal that had something in it that required a little knowledge of how to make it edible. I can go to the grocery store right now and get just about anything precooked. People don't have to know what to do with an raw ingredient because someone somewhere will offer it to them with the preparation already taken care of. I'm not saying it's inherently bad, but it does pose a significant obstacle to people who don't want to rely on those products anymore. There seem to be few resources for people who want to learn as well.
  • magj0y
    magj0y Posts: 1,911 Member
    It is also the quality of the food. Our food is so processed these days that a meal that we had back in the 70's has more calories in it now then it did then. I'm not talking about homemade stuff, but instead the tendency to, instead of making say homemade dinner, going and buying a TV dinner, or instead of a grilled hamburger you did yourself, going to McDonalds. We are packing in food that is so bastardized most people can't even decipher the ingredient contents.

    And this may actually be different in the UK then here in the US. I spent two months there for school last year and noticed a lot of the ingredients were actually Real rather then chemical compositions; but that may have also been where I shopped? I was really quite surprised at not only the actually food in food (so sad I even have to say that) but it's improved taste.

    Like Coca-cola? I can't stomach it here, there, with real sugar? Best soda in the world.

    We've had weight watchers since 1963.
    Enter the video arcade era. Play sports/ride bikes in the heat cold, when you can have a lot of fun inside?
    They became increasingly popular. 'pinball wizard' there were some in the early 70s, 78 produced space invaders. Then the big boys came along with big arcades sucking quarters and keeping kids entertained for HOURS. there is a lot of research done into games on how hard it should be and the amount of time it would take someone to get better to advance and achieve an extra 'man' In 85, we got the nintendo. Activities for the under 21 set slowed down. and increasingly had better things to do in the home
    In 72, HBO made an entrance, but didn't really go mainstream til the late 70s. Late 70s gave us Nickelodeon and 81 gave us MTV. Television was becoming more present in the household with shows, and then movies, all day, every day. It was more than sat. morning cartoons. it was now before and after school. More tv came with more commercials of crap food.

    More TV meant more news. Etan Patz and several other kidnappings put many parents in a tailspin keeping their kids closer to home.
    The 70s also saw
    Married women/mothers enter the work for in droves. (Unlike during war time when there weren't enough men to work at factories)
    a few things this affected;
    kids in extra-curricular activities, able to play outside before 'mom was home' and more single parent homes.
    This gave way to even more foods of conveniences rather than the typical meals served by the previous nuclear family with a stay at home mom. Those who did have kids in sports, with 2 working parents had even less time to prep food. = MORE processed foods.

    Kool aid went main stream in the 60's, along with cyclamate. An artificial sweetener used by pillsbury, but later banned. Hamburger helper joined us in 71, and was in the top 5 fad foods of the 70s. high fructose corn syrup joined coke in in 84.
    by 1969, McD's sold 5 billion burgers. by '76 they sold another 15 billion. by 1984, 50 billion.In 8 years, they sold more burgers than the previous 3 decades.
    It wasn't so much that we started eating more and exercising less, The dynamics of our society changed in many ways.
    from how our food was processed and introducing more artificial chemicals for a variety of reasons, going so far as to use Beaver Anal Glands for artificial raspberry flavorings.

    If you look at art and other statistics in history, though, it was favorable for women to have more pounds on them.
    Look up the paintings "the three graces" ( 1639) and "the bathers" (1887)

    It's so much more than "we ate more did less" There was a ginormous cultural change on so many levels.

    I like pepsi throw back on occasion, but I like barqs best. That and diet sunkist, otherwise, soda goes flat too fast for me.

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